They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.

Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result…. And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away.

“Rick Santorum accused President Obama of requiring free prenatal testing in the health care plan he signed in 2010 because it would detect if children were disabled” so parents could get abortions to “cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

In a 2008 speech at Ave Maria University, Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic, warned about the dangers of “the NBA” and “rock concerts,” but also said that while Protestants founded America, mainline Protestantism is in such “shambles” that “it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it”: We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. […] Whether its sensuality of vanity of the famous in America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners, the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.

Can we please stop pretending that Santorum is a credible, legitimate, candidate.

@8 Actually, he has a point: Our culture is banal, the rich and powerful are venal, and ordinary middle class citizens who work unbelievably hard and put up with incredible bullshit while quietly raising their families are being left in the dust. But none of this makes Ricky a credible or legitimate candidate — he’s just another rightwing demagogue who stirs up the riff-raff with “us versus them” rhetoric.

@8 Actually, he has a point: Our culture is banal, the rich and powerful are venal, and ordinary middle class citizens who work unbelievably hard and put up with incredible bullshit while quietly raising their families are being left in the dust.

In the latest in “guns don’t kill people, people do” action a gunman has shot and killed a woman and critically injured two others and then shot and critically injured (damn, how can you miss the center of your head at point blank range?) himself.

I’m not an advocate for such things, but you can beat someone into a bloody pulp with a length of rebar or two-by-four. It’s pretty damn hard to kill someone and beat two other folks until their critical and then turn the rebar on yourself and beat yourself critical with it. But, with a gun it’s easy. It’s too easy.

News reporting of a possible Israeli strike against Iran, and diplomatic activity aimed at preventing it, have both ramped up this weekend — which suggests such a strike may be imminent. Israel’s prime minister and defense minister are both known to be hawks on this issue, and a recent bump-up in Iran’s nuclear processing capabilities may have pushed the Israelis into crisis mode.

This is merely an academic question because the powerful Israel Lobby will push us into a war with Iran. The most likely scenario is that Israel will start something they can’t finish and then we’ll be compelled to step in.

I say this because sanctions have never worked in the past and won’t work this time, either. I’m not saying sanctions shouldn’t be applied to Iran; they should for several reasons: (1) to extract a price from Iran for its nuclear activities, (2) to weaken Iran militarily and economically, and (3) to undercut the already unpopular regime. But don’t expect sanctions to deter Iran’s mullahs from acquiring nuclear weaponry — they won’t.

The West faces an either-or proposition: Either destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, or let Iran get the bomb. Israel knows this. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be to get at those facilities, because Iran is hardening and undergrounding them at a furious pace. Iran also is stepping up its uranium separation activities to produce weapons-grade material faster. These are the reasons why Israel is champing at the bit and becoming increasingly prone to act unilaterally.

But should Israel and/or the U.S. go to war to stop the Iranian bomb? Is that a rational decision, or a rash one?

Israel is emotionally involved and can’t make a detached judgment, not only because of their proximity to Iran, but also because of their history rooted in the Holocaust. That’s why our government needs to exert pressure on Israel’s leaders to do the sensible thing.

The question that needs to be considered is this: If Iran gets the bomb, so what?

Nuclear weapons are militarily useless. The only time they’ve ever been used was when one country had a monopoly on them — a monopoly that will never again exist. Today, no country can use them. Russia has had the bomb for 60 years and never used it. China has had the bomb for nearly 40 years and hasn’t used it. India and Pakistan are both nuclear-armed, and even though they are neighbors in conflict, they haven’t used it. South Africa’s apartheid regime had the bomb and didn’t use it even to preserve itself. North Korea has the bomb and hasn’t used it.

Iran getting the bomb, in and of itself, wouldn’t be the end of the world. No matter what incendiary rhetoric Iran’s hyperactive president spews, Iran won’t use the bomb either, for the same reasons other governments haven’t used it. For one thing, Ahmadinejad isn’t that crazy, but even if he is, he would be overruled — he’s an employee, not a supreme leader, and he doesn’t make that decision.

But just to make doubly sure that no one in the Iranian regime is ever tempted to use the bomb, we should do the same thing we’ve done in other parts of the world: Put Israel under our “nuclear umbrella,” do what Kennedy did in 1962, i.e., tell Iran and the world that a nuclear attack by Iran against Israel or any other country will be treated as an attack on the United States and will draw a U.S. retaliation. In other words, if they ever use the bomb against anyone, they’ll be annihilated. That policy has kept the peace ever since the dawn of the Nuclear Age, and it’ll work in the future, too.

If Iran gets the bomb, it’ll probably spur other Gulf countries to acquire nuclear arms, too — including Saudi Arabia, which has specifically signaled that it would seek to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan. Egypt would go nuclear, too. Probably so, too, would Turkey and maybe even some former Soviet republics. This would raise the discomfort level in that part of the world, but it wouldn’t necessarily kill anyone. And it wouldn’t necessarily last forever; Iran’s regime is highly unpopular, likely will fall someday, and there’s already precedent for a nuclear nation returning to non-nuclear status after regime change — South Africa.

Against those prospects, we must weigh the certain costs and consequences of a war with Iran. An unknown number of people. In addition to military casualties, there would be Iranian civilian casualties — and also Israeli civilian casualties if the Iran regime makes good its threats to respond to a military attack against it by bombarding Israel with its long-range missiles. And it might require a bloody ground invasion to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities and keep them from being rebuilt. All in all, it’s really questionable whether it’s worth a war to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. We should, of course, continue to hinder them with all other means at our disposal.

But this isn’t the popular course of action, and isn’t the course our policymakers will follow, because no one can get elected by arguing we should let Iran get the bomb. The American public will be rah-rah for “taking it out” by military means, or at least letting the Israelis do so. And Israel has a very powerful lobbying presence in D.C. It’s simply not plausible that reason will prevail in that environment.

This will be an emotional decision, and because Iran won’t back off, there’s going to be a war in the Persian Gulf, and probably very soon. When it happens, gas prices will go through the roof, the entire world will fall back into recession, the stock market will tank, and Roger Rabbit will become a war profiteer by scooping up cheap stocks. Wtf, I tried to talk our government out of it (see above), so don’t blame it on me. If you humans insist on acting like fools, I’ll take your money and run with it. I’d be a fool not to.

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